The Calf

<p><b>Part Appalachian gothic, part science fiction, part Norwegian western, <i>The Calf</i> is a darkly comic backwoods phantasmagoria that bends genres until they break in a feat of linguistic experimentation.</b></p><p>In a subterranean office labyrinth somewhere in Hadeland, Norway, a mechanical barn gnome with a metal bucket for a head spends his days shredding paper, brewing coffee, and trying to forget a certain late summer night in the woods sometime in the 1980s. That night—hazy, mythic, traumatic—centers on the Mare Cooter Canyon and a ragtag bunch of teenage boys calling themselves “the cowboys.” As the narrator’s memory crackles and sputters, we encounter grotesque archetypes: a resurrected Christ-like figure called the Dead Feller, a mysterious, moon-faced woman who may be an employment caseworker, and a strange, amorphous alien called the Calf. What happened out there, and who—or what—is telling the story? </p><p>Drawing on the linguistic inventions of Twain and Faulkner, translator David M. Smith boldly reimagines the rural dialect of Leif Høghaug’s original, bringing it into a lush, inventive Appalachian English. The result is a voice that’s as haunted, broken, and unforgettable as its narrator. <i>The Calf</i> is a howl from the margins, a cracked hymn of language under pressure—conceived and written alongside the author's Norwegian translation of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, and unmistakably charged with that book’s spirit of dream logic, doubleness, and rapturous musicality.</p>